Search

Women seeking to work in horticulture in the early twentieth century were the beneficiaries of developments put in motion by the late nineteenth-century women's rights movement. From the 1860s, feminists and social reformers in Europe and America promoted the opening of higher education to women. After success on this front, by 1900, women's advocates pushed for expanding work opportunities suitable for middle-class women, including in horticulture. This article contributes to the historiography of women and gender in horticulture and agriculture by tracing the opening of horticultural and agricultural schools and employment opportunities for women in Germany and Austria. The analysis shows that while the new schools were modeled on earlier examples in Britain, the programs' curricula were based on that of the German and Austrian agricultural colleges. This European expansion of science-based horticultural education provided middle-class women with occupational prospects that proved more fruitful than university degrees until the rise of anti-Semitism in the years leading up to World War II., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The author declares that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Medieval Iberia witnessed the complex negotiation of religious, social, and economic identities, including the formation of religious orders that played a major role in border disputes and conflicts. While archival records provide insights into the compositions of these orders, there have been few direct dietary or osteoarchaeological studies to date. Here, we analysed 25 individuals discovered at the Zorita de los Canes Castle church cemetery, Guadalajara, Spain, where members of one of the first religious orders, the Order of Calatrava knights, were buried between the 12th to 15th centuries CE. Stable carbon (δ 13 C) and nitrogen (δ 15 N) isotope analyses of bone collagen reveal dietary patterns typical of the Medieval social elite, with the Bayesian R model, 'Simmr' suggesting a diet rich in poultry and marine fish in this inland population. Social comparisons and statistical analyses further support the idea that the order predominantly comprised the lower nobility and urban elite in agreement with historical sources. Our study suggests that while the cemetery primarily served the order's elite, the presence of individuals with diverse dietary patterns may indicate complexities of temporal use or wider social interaction of the medieval military order., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Twenty-four palaeogenomes from Mokrin, a major Early Bronze Age necropolis in southeastern Europe, were sequenced to analyse kinship between individuals and to better understand prehistoric social organization. 15 investigated individuals were involved in genetic relationships of varying degrees. The Mokrin sample resembles a genetically unstructured population, suggesting that the community's social hierarchies were not accompanied by strict marriage barriers. We find evidence for female exogamy but no indications for strict patrilocality. Individual status differences at Mokrin, as indicated by grave goods, support the inference that females could inherit status, but could not transmit status to all their sons. We further show that sons had the possibility to acquire status during their lifetimes, but not necessarily to inherit it. Taken together, these findings suggest that Southeastern Europe in the Early Bronze Age had a significantly different family and social structure than Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age societies of Central Europe.

Archaeology has yet to capitalise on the opportunities offered by bioarchaeological approaches to examine the impact of the 11th-century AD Norman Conquest of England. This study utilises an integrated multiproxy analytical approach to identify and explain changes and continuities in diet and foodways between the 10th and 13th centuries in the city of Oxford, UK. The integration of organic residue analysis of ceramics, carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotope analysis of human and animal bones, incremental analysis of δ13C and δ15N from human tooth dentine and palaeopathological analysis of human skeletal remains has revealed a broad pattern of increasing intensification and marketisation across various areas of economic practice, with a much lesser and more short-term impact of the Conquest on everyday lifestyles than is suggested by documentary sources. Nonetheless, isotope data indicate short-term periods of instability, particularly food insecurity, did impact individuals. Evidence of preferences for certain foodstuffs and cooking techniques documented among the elite classes were also observed among lower-status townspeople, suggesting that Anglo-Norman fashions could be adopted across the social spectrum. This study demonstrates the potential for future archaeological research to generate more nuanced understanding of the cultural impact of the Norman Conquest of England, while showcasing a method which can be used to elucidate the undocumented, everyday implications of other large-scale political events on non-elites., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Objectives: The presence of kin is often, but not always, associated with higher fertility in historical populations. However, the effect of other household members on fertility is less frequently studied. While not genetically related, life-cycle servants lived and worked alongside household members and may have provided assistance to reproducing families. Female servants in particular may have helped mothers with small children through direct help with childcare activities or by replacing the economic effort of mothers whose work was not compatible with childcare. This study examines the presence of servants in the households of married women of reproductive age to assess whether households with young children are more likely to also have servants., Materials and Methods: This study uses individual-level census data from North Orkney, Scotland (1851-1911) to investigate the relationship between the presence of servants in households and a measure of recent net marital fertility, the number of women's own-children under age 5, using logistic regression models., Results: Households with young children were more likely to have a female, but not male, servant in the household after controlling for the effects of other possible helpers, including older children, mothers, and mothers-in-law., Discussion: These findings are consistent with prior research that indicates the importance of female labor to smallholder agricultural households and suggests that female servants may have provided support to reproducing families. Life-cycle servants should be considered one component of biocultural reproduction in historical Northwest Europe. The use of hired help is not restricted to contemporary or elite groups., (© 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism's rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from postcommunist countries ( N = 2,241), compared with 38 capitalist countries ( N = 4,344), support the historical, sociocultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in postcommunist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; postcommunist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism's ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups' stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Postcommunist societies show weaker status-competence relations and stronger (negative) competition-warmth relations; respectively, the lower meritocratic beliefs and higher priority of embeddedness as ideological legacies may shape these relationships.

Across today's developed world, there is a clear mortality gradient by socioeconomic status for all ages. It is often taken for granted that this gradient was as strong-or even stronger-in the past when social transfers were rudimentary and health care systems were less developed. Some studies based on cross-sectional data have supported this view, but others based on longitudinal data found that this was not the case. If there was no gradient in the past, when did it emerge? To answer this question, we examine social class differences in adult mortality for men and women in southern Sweden over a 200-year period, using unique individual-level register data. We find a systematic class gradient in adult mortality emerging at ages 30-59 only after 1950 for women and after 1970 for men, and in subsequent periods also observable for ages 60-89. Given that the mortality gradient emerged when Sweden transitioned into a modern welfare state with substantial social transfers and a universal health care system, this finding points to lifestyle and psychosocial factors as likely determinants.

Objectives: The Early Bronze Age (EBA; ca. 3,600-2000 BCE) of the southern Levant underwent considerable transformation as agro-pastoral communities began to utilize their land more intensively, constructing larger, fortified towns prior to site abandonment at the end of the third millennium. At the site of Bab adh-Dhra' in Jordan, the dead of the Early Bronze (EB) II-III (ca. 3,100-2,500 BCE) period were communally interred within charnel houses, but important disparities between these structures and their contents may be reflective of ownership and use by particular extended kin groups whose activity patterns, subsistence strategies, and even social status may have differed from one another. Subsequently, we hypothesized that differences in mobility and dietary intake may differentiate tomb groups from one another., Materials and Methods: Dental enamel from 31 individuals interred in three different Early Bronze Age charnel houses (A56, A22, A55) at Bab adh-Dhra', Jordan were analyzed for strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope values., Results: Strontium isotope ratios (range: 0.70793-0.70842) possessed medians that did not differ statistically from one another, but had ranges that exhibited significant differences in variance. Carbon isotope values ( x ¯ = -13.2 ± 0.5‰, 1σ) were not significantly different., Discussion: General similarities in human isotopic signatures between EB II-III charnel houses A22 and A55 suggest that their activities were likely similar to one another and agree with findings from excavated domestic spaces with little archaeological evidence for economic, social, or political differentiation. More variable strontium isotope ratios and lower carbon isotope values from A22 could reflect a greater involvement with pastoralist practices or regional trade, including the consumption of more 13 C-depleted foods, while those in A55 may have led a more sedentary lifestyle with greater involvement in cultivating orchard crops. All charnel houses contained nonlocal individuals likely originating from other Dead Sea Plain sites with no EB II-III cemeteries of their own, supporting the idea that extended kin groups throughout the region returned to Bab adh-Dhra' to bury their dead., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Revealing and understanding the mechanisms behind social inequality in prehistoric societies is a major challenge. By combining genome-wide data, isotopic evidence, and anthropological and archaeological data, we have gone beyond the dominating supraregional approaches in archaeogenetics to shed light on the complexity of social status, inheritance rules, and mobility during the Bronze Age. We applied a deep microregional approach and analyzed genome-wide data of 104 human individuals deriving from farmstead-related cemeteries from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age in southern Germany. Our results reveal individual households, lasting several generations, that consisted of a high-status core family and unrelated low-status individuals; a social organization accompanied by patrilocality and female exogamy; and the stability of this system over 700 years., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.)

Objectives: Histomorphometric studies show consistent links between physical activity patterns and the microstructure underlying the size and shape of bone. Here, we adopt a combined bone approach to explore variation in microstructure of ribs and humeri related to physical activity and historical records of manual labor in skeletal samples of children (n = 175) from medieval England. The humerus reflects greater biomechanically induced microstructural variation than the rib which is used here as a control. Variation in microstructure is sought between regions in England (Canterbury, York, Newcastle), and between high- and low-status children from Canterbury., Materials and Methods: Thin-sections were prepared from the humerus or rib and features of bone remodeling were recorded using high-resolution microscopy and image analysis software., Results: The density and size of secondary osteons in the humerus differed significantly in children from Canterbury when compared to those from York and Newcastle. Among the older children, secondary osteon circularity and diameter differed significantly between higher and lower status children., Discussion: By applying bone remodeling principles to the histomorphometric data, we infer that medieval children in Canterbury engaged in less physically demanding activities than children from York or Newcastle. Within Canterbury, high-status and low-status children experienced similar biomechanical loading until around 7 years of age. After this age low-status children performed activities that resulted in more habitual loading on their arm bones than the high-status children. This inferred change in physical activity is consistent with historical textual evidence that describes children entering the work force at this age., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Scientists and social scientists often read the same text differently. They also construct categories having the same nomenclature independently. Many of us also work in isolated domains, rarely reading texts researched and documented by others. We conduct our research within the defined format of our disciplines. We engage with others only when contestations emerge and challenge some of the rooted paradigms of each other's disciplines. This paper reflects the reactions of a social scientist to texts on population genetics and attempts to arrive at the genetic theory of the origin of ethnological history of human populations in India. Inadvertently, most of these intensely researched and passionately documented DNA evidence present a serious challenge to the discourse of cultural pluralism and social diversity that the humanist perspective of science and social science takes pride in documenting. This paper is based on secondary resource materials and the methodology adopted is that of narrative research.

The history of the racial classification of the people of India can be looked at in three temporal phases: (1) at the national level, the initial studies of racial classification attempted along with the Census of India; (2) at the regional level, studies by anthropologists and statisticians following systematic sampling and statistical procedures were conducted after the initial national-level studies and (3) population-specific studies in different regions across the country including micro-evolutionary studies of individual populations followed the regional studies. Initially the racial classification was part of the Census survey conducted by British anthropologists in some parts of the country among castes and tribes and was based on a few physical traits. This was followed by a systematic anthropometric survey in particulars regions (e.g., UP, Bengal, etc.) by anthropologists and statisticians. This was followed by population specific micro-evolutionary studies across different regions by numerous anthropologists investigating the role of selection, drift, migration and admixture and other population structure variables among endogamous castes and tribes.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an 'experiment', testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of 'practical phrenology' subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its 'users' and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists' notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as 'epistemological contests', audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.

The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

Objectives: Previous work by Vercellotti et al. in 2011 found significant status-related differences in body size in males but not in females from the Italian bioarchaeological assemblage of San Michele di Trino (8th-14th centuries CE). The purpose of the present work is twofold: (a) to determine if status-related body size differences could be observed in the nearby collection of San Lorenzo di Alba (7th-15th centuries CE) and (b) to add to the emerging narrative of medieval Italians., Materials and Methods: Osteometric data (maximum length for the humerus, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula; bicondylar length of the femur, condylo-malleolar length of the tibia, foot height, maximum vertebral heights, and basion-bregma height) were collected for 50 (20 female, 30 male) individuals from Alba, and Monte Carlo analysis was used to assess differences in skeletal element size, skeletal height, living stature, and body mass across sex and status., Results: Significant differences were detected between high status and low status males in Alba for radial maximum length (p = 0.013), tibial maximum length (p = 0.011), tibial condylo-malleolar length (p = 0.012), skeletal height estimated from condylo-malleolar tibial length (p = 0.002), and stature estimated from condyle-malleolar tibial length with the age component (p = 0.003). In contrast, no significant status-based differences were observed between female subsamples (p > 0.05)., Discussion: The patterns of intrapopulation variation observed at Alba are similar but not as pronounced as those observed at Trino, suggesting that overall life conditions experienced by the two groups were comparable., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.

Within the framework of the Sicily Mummy Project, the orofacial complex of a significant sample of individuals (n=111) from the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, was inspected. The heads and dentitions of the mummies were documented and the recorded findings described: the state of preservation of skeletal and soft tissues; dental pathologies such as carious lesions and alveolar bone loss; enamel hypoplasia; and ante- and post-mortem tooth loss. Despite limitations in data collection, the oral health of these mummies was assessed and the frequencies of pathologies were compared to those of similar populations. From their position within the corridors of the Catacombs, sex and social status of the mummies were also inferred, allowing the dental pathologies to be specified in the social and historical context. Most interestingly, the rate of oral health problems did not differ between the groups of the members of the Capuchin Order and the laymen of the city of Palermo, despite their different lifestyles., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.)

So-called "Ohaguro", teeth blackening, in the married females was a general custom regardless of class in the early modern period. As a result, Ohaguro was thought to have enhanced the acid resistance of tooth substance and tightened gingiva and prevented tooth morbidity due to periodontal disease. For investigation into the influence of Ohaguro, the skeletal remains of early modern samurai and commoners at Kokura were examined for differences in the dental pathology based on sex. Though females from archeological sites have significantly more carious teeth and antemortem tooth loss (AMTL) than males in the previous studies, the prevalence of caries and AMTL in males was higher than in females among the early modern samurai and commoners in Kokura. The efficacies of Ohaguro may influence the good dental health of females. On the other hand, as females were considered inferior to males under the feudal system in Japan, males, including children, might tend to consume more nutritious foods compared to females. However, those foods are certainly not better with regard to dental health, since those foods are more highly cariogenic. These factors may have caused higher caries and AMTL prevalence among males compared to females in early modern Kokura.

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of social and occupational status on the BMI of the gentry and peasantry in the Kingdom of Poland at the turn of 19th and early 20th centuries. Use was made of data on the height and weight of 304 men, including 200 peasants and 104 gentlemen, and 275 women, including 200 from the peasantry and 75 from the gentry. Gentlemen were characterized by a greater body height than peasants (169.40 cm and 166.96 cm, respectively), a greater body weight (67.09 kg and 60.99 kg, respectively) and a higher BMI (23.33 kg/m2 and 21.83 kg/m2, respectively). Landowners and intelligentsia had a greater BMI than peasants (23.12 kg/m2 and 24.20 kg/m2 vs 21.83 kg/m2, respectively). In the case of women, there were no statistically significant differences in mean height, weight and BMI by their social position, and in BMI by occupational status. Underweight occurred less frequently in the gentry and more frequently in the peasantry (0.97% and 2.04%, respectively). Overweight was five times more common in gentlemen than in peasants (26.21% and 5.10%, respectively). Differences in the BMI of gentlefolk and peasants resulted from differences in diet and lifestyle related to socioeconomic status.

Objectives: Stone-lined graves, which first appear in Bavarian territory during the 7 th century AD, are assumed to be tombs of emerging nobility. While previous research on stone-lined grave goods supports their status as elite burials, an important factor defining nobility-kinship-has not been examined so far., Materials and Methods: Morphological analysis of the commingled skeletal remains of 21 individuals from three archaeological sites was carried out. Radiocarbon dating was conducted on these individuals to gain information on usage intervals of these graves. To test whether stone-lined graves can be considered family graves, analyses of mitochondrial HVR I, Y-chromosomal and autosomal STRs were carried out., Results: Morphological examination revealed a surplus of males buried in stone-lined graves and radiocarbon dating points to usage of the tombs for several generations. According to aDNA analysis, kinship can be assumed both between and within stone-lined graves., Discussion: Taken together, these results hint at burials of family members with high social status being inhumed at the same site, in some cases even the same grave, for several generations. They also suggest, for the first time, that an early medieval linear cemetery was structured according to biological kinship., (© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Puerperal insanity has been described as a nineteenth-century diagnosis, entrenched in contemporary expectations of proper womanly behaviour. Drawing on detailed study of establishment registers and patient case notes, this paper examines the puerperal insanity diagnosis at Dundee Lunatic Asylum between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the study aims to consider whether the class or social status of the patients had a bearing on how their conditions were perceived and rationalized, and how far the puerperal insanity diagnosis, coloured by the values assigned to it by the medical officers, may have been reserved for some women and not for others. This examination of the diagnosis in a Scottish community, suggesting a contrast in the way that middle-class and working-class women were diagnosed at Dundee, engages with and expands on work on puerperal insanity elsewhere.

Throughout the eighteenth century the issue of authenticity shaped portrayals of fashionable diseases. From the very beginning of the century, writers satirized the behavior of elite invalids who paraded their delicacy as a sign of their status. As disorders such as the spleen came to be regarded as "fashionable," the legitimacy of patients' claims to suffer from distinguished diseases was called further into question, with some observers questioning the validity of the disease categories themselves. During the early and middle decades of the century, criticism was largely confined to periodicals, plays, and poetry, while medical writers wrote in defense of the authenticity of such conditions. The adoption of fashionable ailments and nervous sensibility grew increasingly popular, however, and from the 1770s onwards practitioners and novelists increasingly suggested that such diseases should not be trusted as signifiers of personal qualities or social status.

This chapter focuses on the individualistic nature of medicine by considering manuscript recipe collections, and the concerns and rhetoric of the elite patients who wrote about fashionable diseases and experienced them. Domestic medicine in the eighteenth century was a facet of elite health care that included commercial medicine and professional assistance. Looking broadly at the fashionability of health care, including the fashionability of the consumer goods and services linked to self-management and leisure time, reveals the realities of fashionable diseases in elite lives. The sociocultural rhetoric of fashionable diseases was incorporated into the recipe collecting tradition, but experiences of suffering and a need for care continued to be at the forefront of the discourse in domestic medicine and this writing tradition. This essay argues also that domestic rhetoric and experiences of fashionable disease were significantly driven by consumerism.

The economic effects of social structure are dependent on culture and must be understood in their cultural context. The authors demonstrate this with an analysis of the Liverpool slave trade. They show that as abolitionism became more salient in British culture, connections in a coinvestment network to both slavers and nonslavers mattered much more for predicting entry into the slave trade. As abolitionism rose, nonslavers in that public network gained relatively more influence than slavers, but the reverse was true in the private network of an elite social club. Furthermore, the status of a potential slaver mattered much more during the abolition era, as the emergent clarity of norms against slaving constrained high-status traders less than middle-status traders. The authors present advice to network and status theorists as to how they can reflect cultural contingency even in studies conducted in stable cultural contexts, thereby creating a more integrated and robust economic sociology.

Summary: Background: There is a common perception that tall stature results in social dominance. Evidence in meerkats suggests that social dominance itself may be a strong stimulus for growth. Relative size serves as the signal for individuals to induce strategic growth adjustments . Aim: We construct a thought experiment to explore the potential consequences of the question: is stature a social signal also in humans? We hypothesize that (1) upward trends in height in the lower social strata are perceived as social challenges yielding similar though attenuated upward trends in the dominant strata, and that (2) democratization, but also periods of political turmoil that facilitate upward mobility of the lower strata, are accompanied by upward trends in height. Material and methods: We reanalyzed large sets of height data of European conscripts born between 1856-1860 and 1976-1980; and annual data of German military conscripts, born between 1965 and 1985, with information on height and school education. Results: Taller stature is associated with higher socioeconomic status. Historic populations show larger height differences between social strata that tend to diminish in the more recent populations. German height data suggest that both democratization, and periods of political turmoil facilitating upward mobility of the lower social strata are accompanied by a general upward height spiral that captures the whole population. Discussion: We consider stature as a signal. Nutrition, health, general living conditions and care giving are essential prerequisites for growth, yet not to maximize stature, but to allow for its function as a lifelong social signal. Considering stature as a social signal provides an elegant explanation of the rapid height adjustments observed in migrants, of the hitherto unexplained clustering of body height in modern and historic cohorts of military conscripts, and of the parallelism between changes in political conditions, and secular trends in adult human height since the 19 th century.

There have been a number of previous estimates of human inbreeding for Britons of British descent in Britain, each generally for different social classes, geographical regions, and/or time periods. In this study I attempted to collect all relevant published studies and combine these disparate results into an integrated whole for all of Britain. This was achieved by combining weighted means of the percentage of consanguineous marriages (f%) reported in these earlier studies: weighted according to the number of records each author examined, the proportion of social classes or geographic regions covered by the records, and the "merit" of their individual research methodologies. The percentage occurrences of the various consanguineous marriages, from first to third cousins, were partitioned into a number of time periods, which allowed the weighted mean percentage inbreeding coefficients (F%) to be obtained as a function of time over the period from 1820 to 1960. The resulting temporal scatter distribution of the weighted F% values closely followed a sigmoidal curve, with a nonlinear correlation coefficient of η = 0.974, which fitted well to a generalized logistic function. After about 1900 the value of the weighted F% was essentially constant at about 0.038 ± 0.004, whereas it decreased rapidly from about 0.256 ± 0.011 between 1820 and 1900. The upper-bound value of weighted F% before 1820 from the fitted logistic function is 0.276. This corresponds to a value of the conventional mean inbreeding coefficient F = 0.00276. As the first known attempt to integrate the earlier disparate values of unweighted F% for Britons of British descent for all of Britain, the results of this analysis are promising and should be useful as reference values in other related studies.

The purpose of this study is to document and explain secular trends in stature among Northern Jordanian men and women between the years of birth 1960 and 1990, as they relate to overall per capita socio-economic improvement, the stature of 360 adults from two Northern governorates, those of Jerash and Irbid, was measured. General linear model (GLM) was used to examine the effect of birth-decade, education level of subject, and their interaction on mean stature of each sex separately. GLM results revealed that women who were born during the following three decades pooled together (1951-1980) did not differ significantly in mean stature from those born during (1981-1990). Among men, stature of those born in the two pooled birth-decades together (1951-1970) did not significantly differ of those were born in the two pooled birth-decades (1971-1990)., (Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level. Results indicate that between-class income differences grew by about 60% since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable. A formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between-class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality.

Looking at nineteenth-century Germany, this article investigates the origin of the idea that fiction causes disease, among both the bourgeoisie and the working class. I argue that the socially constructed notions of reading addiction, which were consistent with medical concepts at that time, touched the bourgeois virtues of industriousness and health. However, little has been written about the transfer of the bourgeois attitudes towards reading to the German working class. The study of workers' autobiographies shows that social circumstances and the emulation of bourgeois values and attitudes resulted in appropriating the concept of lazy readers in the working class. The paper follows the paths from the early nineteenth century accusation of readers to the working class's perception of novels causing disease around 1900.

This contribution focuses on the medical practice of the policlinics in Würzburg and Göttingen in the first half of the nineteenth century. In these institutions patients were treated free of charge by medical students and assistant physicians who, in turn, were able to gain further experience and develop their skills. The policlinics were therefore an important part of poor-healthcare in both these cities. The essay tries in particular to illustrate healthcare for poor patients against the background of their everyday lives and working environment. Based on the situation of individual poor patients, the concepts of 'sickness' and 'poverty' are discussed as mutually dependent determinants of the 'reality of life' among the urban lower classes. This contribution combines the evaluation of medical practice journals and patient histories with the analysis of source materials on urban poor relief and healthcare. It looks particularly at the children and elderly people who attended the policlinics. The encounters between physicians and poor patients documented in the sources not only provide valuable insights into historical patient behaviours, they also open up new perspectives of the physician-patient relationship during the nineteenth century transition from the 'sickbed-society' to hospital medicine.

Breadfruit is best known in connection with an infamously failed project: the 1789 mutiny against the Bounty, commanded by William Bligh. However, four years later, Bligh returned to the Pacific and fulfilled his commission, delivering breadfruit and other Pacific foods to Caribbean plantations. Placing these plant transfers in the emerg- ing sciences of food and nutrition in the eighteenth century, this essay examines the broader political project of what would much later be called 'the welfare state; which motivated British officials' interest in experimenting with novel ingredients and recipes to cheaply nourish a range of dependent populations in institutional settings. Perhaps most strikingly, their nutritional recommendations borrowed directly from agricultural practices, particularly from new methods for feeding livestock in confinement.

Individual stature depends on multifactorial causes and is often used as a proxy for investigating the biological standard of living. While the majority of European studies on 19th and 20th century populations are based on conscript heights, stature derived from skeletal remains are scarce. For the first time in Denmark this study makes a comparison between skeletal stature and contemporary Danish conscript heights and investigates stature of males and females temporally and between socially distinct individuals and populations in 19th and early 20th century Copenhagen. A total of 357 individuals (181 males, 176 females) excavated at the Assistens cemetery in Copenhagen is analyzed. Two stature regression formulae (Trotter, 1970; Boldsen, 1990) are applied using femur measurements and evaluated compared to conscript heights. The results indicate that mean male stature using Boldsen follows a similar trend as the Danish conscript heights and that Trotter overestimate stature by ca. 6cm over Boldsen. At an inter population level statistically significant differences in male stature are observed between first and second half of the 19th century towards a slight stature decrease and larger variation while there are no significant changes observed in female stature. There are insignificant differences in stature between middle and high class individuals, but male stature differs statistically between cemeteries (p=0.000) representing middle/high class, paupers and navy employees, respectively. Female stature had no significant wealth gradient (p=0.516). This study provides new evidence of stature among males and females during the 19th century and suggests that males may have been more sensitive to changes in environmental living and nutrition than females., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This paper elucidates the historical origins and transformations of India's caste system. Surveying the complex developments over many centuries, it points out that three positions have been taken in this regard. One suggests that the caste one is born into can be transcended within one's lifetime by performing good deeds. The other declares caste to be immutable forever. And, the third says that one can be reborn into a higher caste if one lives a virtuous life. Moving on to the sociopolitical realm, the paper notes how these positions have been used and exploited. The paper then attempts to anchor the existence and purpose of the Hindu caste system in Freud's ideas about group psychology and Klein's proposals of splitting and projective identification. The paper also deploys the large group psychology concepts of Volkan and the culturally nuanced psychoanalytic anthropology of Roland and Kakar. It concludes with delineating some ameliorative strategies for this tragic problem in the otherwise robust democratic society of India.

This article proposes explanations for the transformation of American families over the past two centuries. I describe the impact on families of the rise of male wage labor beginning in the nineteenth century and the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth century. I then examine the effects of decline in wage labor opportunities for young men and women during the past four decades. I present new estimates of a precipitous decline in the relative income of young men and assess its implications for the decline for marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the deterioration of economic opportunity and speculate on the impact of technological change on the future of work and families.

This article discusses the medicinal remedies consumed at the court of the Yorkist kings of England in the light of a lawsuit in the court of common pleas (edited in an appendix) between John Clerk, king's apothecary to Edward IV, and Katherine Neville, Duchess of Norfolk, over the partial non-payment of the apothecary's bills. It argues that the consumption of apothecaries' wares in large quantities was not merely a direct result of the excessive diet of the late medieval aristocracy, but in itself represented a facet of the conspicuous consumption inherent in the lifestyle of this particular social class. The remedies supplied by Clerk over a period of several years and listed in the legal record are set in the context of contemporary collections of medical recipes, particularly a 'dispensary' in the British Library's Harleian collection generally attributed to the king's apothecary.

The lives of the first women doctors in Britain have been well studied by historians, as have the many debates about the right of women to train and practice as doctors. Yet the relationship between these women and their most obvious comparators and competitors-the newly professionalized hospital nurses-has not been explored. This article makes use of a wide range of sources to explore the ways in which the first lady doctors created "clear water" between themselves and the nurses with whom they worked and trained. In doing so, it reveals an identity that may seem at odds with some of the clichés of Victorian femininity, namely that of the intelligent and ambitious lady doctor.

This paper discusses changing views about gender and drinking in Sweden c. 1830-1922. The author posits that the emergence of bourgeois morals in the 19th century were associated with a decline in the tolerance for female alcohol consumption, and also shows how the values, norms, and activities of the temperance movement interconnected with religion and notions of purity. Yet, in spite of hardening attitudes against women's drinking, alcohol remained integral in Swedish upper-class women's lives. The results are based on a qualitative study of Swedish women's diaries. The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council, 2009-2012. Study limitations are also noted.

The use of body mass index values (BMI) to measure living standards is now a well-accepted method in economics. Nevertheless, a neglected area in historical studies is the relationship between 19th century BMI and family size, and this relationship is documented here to be positive. Material inequality and BMI are the subject of considerable debate, and there was a positive relationship between BMI and wealth and an inverse relationship with inequality. After controlling for family size and wealth, BMI values were related with occupations, and farmers and laborers had greater BMI values than workers in other occupations., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.)

The evaluation of social differences in dental health is based on the assumption that individuals belonging to a higher social class consumed a different diet than a common people. The aim of our study was to analyse and compare dental health of 16(th) - 17(th) c. individuals, buried inside and around the Roman Catholic Church in Trakai (Lithuania). All material (189 adult individuals) was divided in two samples of a presumably different social status: the Churchyard (ordinary townsmen) and the Presbytery (elite). Dental status analysis included that of tooth loss, tooth wear, caries, abscesses and calculus. Results revealed higher prevalence of dental disease in the Churchyard sample compared to the Presbytery. Individuals buried around the church had statistically higher prevalence of caries, antemortem tooth loss and abscesses compared to those who were buried inside the church. The Churchyard sample was also characterised by a higher increase in severity of caries with age, and a more rapid tooth wear. Differences in dental health between the samples the most probably reflect different dietary habits of people from different social groups: poor quality carbohydrate based diet of laymen buried in the churchyard and more varied diet with proteins and of a better quality of local elite, buried inside the church. Substantial sex differences in dental health were found only in the Churchyard sample: males had statistically higher prevalence of abscesses and calculus, while females had higher prevalence of caries and AMTL (antemortem tooth loss). Females were also characterised by a higher increase in the number of dental decay and tooth loss with age and had higher prevalence of gross caries, which indicates a more rapid progression of the disease. Worse dental health of females could be a result of culturally based dietary differences between females (more carbohydrates) and males (more proteins) and different physiological demands (hormonal fluctuations and suppression of immune system during pregnancy).

In the decades following the discovery of insulin, eugenicists grew concerned that more diabetics would survive into their reproductive years and contribute "defective" genes to the gene pool. Insulin thus came to be seen as both a blessing for the individual and a problem for the future of humankind. Nevertheless, diabetics in the United States were neither prevented nor discouraged from reproducing. I argue that this stemmed from the widespread belief that diabetes was a disease primarily of middle-class whites, who possessed positive traits that outweighed their particular genetic defect. Historians of eugenics have demonstrated convincingly that race and class stereotypes made some populations more vulnerable to coercive eugenic practices. The case of diabetes demonstrates that race and class stereotypes could also confer protection. In the end, possession of a defective gene mattered less than the perception of one's contribution to society., (© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Objectives: The aim of the study was to map the dental health status in non-adult individuals and to verify whether and how the existence of caries in the non-adult age group is associated with the different socio-economic status of early medieval populations., Material and Methods: We studied the dental remains from the acropolis of the Mikulčice settlement agglomeration, where members of the higher social classes were buried, and from the Mikulčice hinterland. Overall, we evaluated 2544 teeth/3714 alveoli of deciduous dentition and 1938 teeth/2128 alveoli of permanent dentition. We determined the number of individuals with dental caries (i.e., caries frequency index, F-CE) and the proportion of teeth/alveoli with caries/ante-mortem tooth loss (i.e., caries intensity index, I-CE)., Results: We found no statistical significant difference in the F-CE values between the Mikulčice hinterland and the acropolis. In addition, we found no statistically significant difference in the proportion of teeth with carious lesions (I-CE) either in the case of deciduous dentition or in the case of permanent dentition between the hinterland and the acropolis. In the case of permanent dentition, the statistically significant highest proportion of carious lesions (I-CE) was found in Mikulčice I (p ≤ 0.05). We confirmed an increase in the rate of caries with age., Conclusions: The level of caries at all of the studied medieval locations was very low. We presume that lifestyle and the associated dietary habits and hygienic practices of the individuals or population groups had a greater influence on dental caries than did the socio-economic status of these individuals., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in The Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal resemblance through the value and inequality of family resources based on a job competition model in combination with modernization theory, status maintenance theory, and dualism theory. The authors use the high-quality, large-scale database GENLIAS, yielding digitized information for approximately 450,000 linked Dutch marriage certificates from 250,000 families, complemented with historical indicators of six modernization processes for over 2,500 communities. Using multilevel meta-regression models, they find that brother correlations in status decreased slowly from about 1860 onward. Although this exactly parallels the period of modernization, the authors find that modernization processes were not responsible (except possibly urbanization and mass transportation). In fact, in line with dualism theory, fraternal resemblance increased with most processes (i.e., industrialization, educational expansion, in-migration, and mass communication) because they amplified in-equality.

Height is regarded as one of the indicators of environmental stress at population level, being an excellent barometer of standard of living. The aim of this study was to describe diversity in height among populations living in different regions of the Kingdom of Poland in terms of the economic factors in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century. This study examines the height of adult inhabitants from five guberniyas (provinces) of the Kingdom of Poland (Łomża, Warsaw, Radom, Kalisz and Płock) collected in the years 1897-1914 (N = 732 men, N = 569 women). Differences in average height of male and female inhabitants across the five guberniyas were examined using ANOVA and the Fisher's LSD (Least Significant Difference) test of multiple comparisons. Statistically significant differences in the height between the guberniyas were observed. Diversity in the economic development in the studied guberniyas of the Kingdom of Poland translated into differences in the height of their inhabitants. Moreover, an increase in mean height over time was noted.